Earlier, we posted about our new MacBook Airs, which, still in only their first days of use, have been freezing and crashing like crazy. This generated some great discussion threads, from both readers and writers alike.

Apparently, we're not the only ones with this MacBook bug!

The general consensus seems to point towards Google Chrome as the culprit.

This sucks. I know. Safari is shit and I miss Chrome dearly. But the crashing didn't stop until I quit Chrome altogether. It's been about 2 hrs so far—knock wood—and things have been running smoothly.

The discussion doesn't differ much over in the MacRumors forums, either: New MBAs running Google Chrome freeze and crash abruptly and without warning—and the performance of the computer, until a crash, is otherwise very, very good.

Until a Google Chrome update is released, best to stay off the browser and tough it out with Safari or Firefox. With any luck, it won't be long.

Please add your own findings to the discussion! This could be the start of something big...

Update: A spokesperson for Google reached out to Gizmodo, directing us to their Chrome release blog and issuing the below statement with regards to our MacBook Air/Chrome crash hypothesis. (We were right!)

We have identified a leak of graphics resources in the Chrome browser related to the drawing of plugins on Mac OS X. Work is proceeding to find and fix the root cause of the leak.

The resource leak is causing a kernel panic on Mac hardware containing the Intel HD 4000 graphics chip (e.g. the new Macbook Airs). Radar bug number 11762608 has been filed with Apple regarding the kernel panics, since it should not be possible for an application to trigger such behavior.

While the root cause of the leak is being fixed, we are temporarily disabling some of Chrome's GPU acceleration features on the affected hardware via an auto-updated release that went out this afternoon (Thursday June 28). We anticipate further fixes in the coming days which will re-enable many or all of these features on this hardware.